Wednesday 30 August 2000 07.14 EDT
First published on Wednesday 30 August 2000 07.14 EDT

The most extraordinary arrogance underpinned the comments of the spokesman for the National Beef Association, who yesterday sought to minimise the significance of the latest findings in the BSE scandal by questioning the conduct of research in what he described as "an obscure area". It was precisely that kind of arrogance within farming that in the first place produced this shameful outrage that has already killed 70 people and humiliated an entire industry.

The suggestion by Robert Foster, speaking on behalf of the country's troubled beef farmers, was that the incidence of BSE in cows is now diminishing, that the number of cases of new variant CJD in humans might therefore also be expected to reduce in number in future and therefore that we can all get back to our roast beef and Yorkshires and relax in the comfortable knowledge that these issues are being handled by people with a greater expertise than ourselves. Butchers can get back to such business as they have been bequeathed by the deadly combination of supermarkets and food poisoning, the scientists can cheerfully forget about these unnecessarily alarming matters and perhaps occupy themselves with something more socially useful, while the environmental lobby can get back in its box.

Yet it was the arrogant pursuit of profit to the exclusion of all other considerations which led an over-confident beef industry to feed ground-up dead sheep to herbivorous cows and cause this chaos. It was an arrogant complacency within farming which accepted for years the existence of scrapie in sheep without bothering to worry about the potential for this disease to cross into other animals. It hadn't happened - so why should it ? The incidence of human CJD caught from scrapie in sheep was known, but very rare. So, arguably, that particular complacency was justified - at least until the greedy farmers tried to maximise their profits by so unthinkingly causing the contamination of the entire beef industry and feeding diseased sheep carcasses to cows.

Now when it is revealed as a result of serious scientific study by the government-funded Medical Research Council that it is possible that a highly infectious variant of BSE could exist in another form in other species - sheep and pigs and poultry - someone speaking on behalf of the beef industry has the temerity to suggest that this is an "obscure" area for inquiry. It will not seem obscure to those relatives of innocent victims who have already died. In due course, it won't seem obscure either to any of that unknown number who may still be carrying the infection. And it doesn't seem obscure to me, a consumer. I want to know about these things.

My interest is no different to that of any other consumer, except that in the late 1980s I contracted food poisoning when pregnant as a result, presumably, of inefficient - or at least inappropriate - farming practices. In our case it was listeria monocytogenes and, mercifully, my baby and I survived. At the time, no one had heard of listeria, including the midwives in the maternity hospital. I watched my diet with great care and attention as any pregnant woman would. Although things had been a bit touch and go at the time of the birth - an emergency caesarean, intensive care, isolation wards, three weeks in hospital - I still hadn't realised quite how serious it all was until I had a visit from an official at the Public Health Laboratories. A man with a briefcase in due course arrived, exuding official assurances, to ask me about my diet. The baby had been born, three weeks early, in June; the official came to call in September and it was then that he wanted to know all that I had eaten in May. He wanted to know everything. If I had sausages, where would I have bought them? Did I wash my lettuces? Did I like cheese? What brand of butter?

My point in rehearsing this personal experience is to relate the extent to which it heightened my awareness of how close, how casual, had been my brush with serious food poisoning. There had been 19 cases of the same strain of listeria that year - none of us ever having heard of it, of course - and a number of them had died, the man with the briefcase revealed. It made me very conscious indeed of the extent to which it was possible to poison oneself unknowingly.

So it was with great interest that I recall attending a press conference held jointly by the Department of Health and the Ministry of Agriculture on February 27 1989, at which it was announced that the government had ordered that ground-up bits of the spinal column of cows along with some other less appealing bits of the animal were in future to be banned not only from baby food, but from the entire food chain. That press conference was a revelation. I was ignorant enough to be astonished to learn that baby food was not made up of the finest minced rump steak - but that was completely incidental. The event was dominated by a series of question to officials about the chances of "mad cow disease", as we had just learned to call it, crossing into the human food chain. The message was, by and large, to forget it.

Time and again the officials present were challenged. They insisted that such a cross-infection was something about which we should not be concerned - and that, in any case, if there was to be a problem we would not know about it for 10 or 12 years. And so it proved. John MacGregor, the agriculture minister at the time, took pride then, as he still does (or is he demonstrating a measure of relief?) in the fact that he was prepared to go further than the official advice which was limited to merely restricting dubious beef bits in baby food. MacGregor extended it to all food despite the reservations of some of his officials at his readiness to go beyond scientific advice. And all praise to him.

But there was a complacency at large then, as there is still. There was great nervousness about the alarm that had been provoked in the public mind about the safety of our food. There is still. There are various points to be made about publishing the interim results of research of the kind we heard about yesterday. It is, for example, almost certainly unhelpful to the farming industry. Well, bad luck on them. Regrettably that industry has forfeited any right to take decisions involving public health on our behalf. Isn't it actually more likely to be a source of public confidence rather than anything else that scientists are still monitoring what is going on in agriculture as a result of the industry's past mistakes and mismanagement ?

And so what if publication, unaccompanied by appropriate advice, is alarmist, as was also suggested yesterday. As the chairman of the Science and Technology Select Committee, Michael Clarke said: "If the whole country has to go vegetarian, then for goodness sake say so." That is one response. But the most important thing is that we, as consumers, should be alerted to what is going on and given the the information that enables us to take our own decisions, unfettered by other people's commercial concerns.